The idea of the one-man band has been with us for at least eight centuries, going back to the peripatetic flute and snare-like tabor players of rural France. My personal favorite was “Duster” Bennett, who toured with John Mayall in 1970, a bill I saw at the Fillmore East that year. The most fa-mous of this odd bunch was Don Partridge, who roamed Europe with a bass drum on his back and a guitar and harmonica up front, and who man-aged to snag a top-ten hit in 1968, possibly a first for any multi-instrumental busker. Technology has made it possible to approach the notion of a one-person orchestra, with battery-powered MIDI triggering all sorts of sound generators. And now, it’s also brought us the concept of the one-man stage crew.
The Piano Man
Mark Martin has been an itinerant sound mixer for years and once ran U.S. marketing for international media arts educator SAE, which certainly provided him with experience in juggling multiple items. He put that to good use when he began working with My Baby Grand, a nascent multi-media touring show out of Austin, Texas, in which pianist Matt Wilson, who starred in the Broadway hit Movin’ Out, interprets the great piano players of pop music from Elton John to Billy Joel, backed only by a live drummer; the rest of the show was filled in with prerecorded music and vocal tracks, plus video. If the on-stage line-up appears sparse, the technical crew halves it; Martin rigs and runs sound, lights and video — includ-ing three live cameras — totally solo.
Thirty-two PAR cans on a truss, augmented by two Martin Roboscans, light the show. The lighting design is controlled by the PC-based DJ light-ing control software package that interfaces with Martin’s laptop via USB and then connects to each light unit using DMX512 protocol. A DVD running on a Denon professional drive holds the videos with which the two live musicians interact, as well as the 5.1 prerecorded audio tracks with which they play along. The disc has two other key automation elements — a click track that the two live musicians use as their song intro cues and timing and an SMPTE time code track, which gives the lights their cues.
Two Sylvania 6848 48-inch plasma screens flank the stage; a pair of Epson S4 projectors runs a constantly changing backdrop behind the screens. A Panasonic WJMA20 switcher lets Martin toggle between the prerecorded video and input from three Panasonic camcorders — two truss-mounted and the third on a tripod, reachable from the FOH position, that Martin occasionally zooms. The video content — mostly other musicians and vocalists — is synched to the live performance and stops automatically with an “infinite pause” that Martin programmed onto the end of each track, which waits for him to hit Play for the next song after Wilson’s between-song patter. Martin mixes on a 32-input Allen & Heath 2800 audio console with a small rack of dbx and Lexicon processors.
It’s basically all off-the-shelf technology. Martin had to come up with a few tricks — the DVD player has no output level control, so he had to route the SMPTE time code track through an aux send on the console to give it enough level to be reliably read by the laptop. “I could have burned it hotter onto the DVD, but then you run the risk of crosstalk with the audio channels,” he explains. The learning curve on the DVD Studio Pro software and learning to integrate lighting and video into the show took him about two weeks — keep in mind that Martin has a professional back-ground almost exclusively in audio. And if the DVD drive, perhaps the single most critical piece of hardware in the show, were to fail, Martin has a second one running in synch with a copy of the master DVD on it; switch-over would be near instantaneous.
And It’s a Bargain
The bottom line is that this sophisticated multimedia show’s core technologies, which were mostly software, cost less than $1,000. And one person operates it all. Much of the show is preprogrammed, but there’s still enough flexibility built in, such as control over the camera switching and lens, to adapt to the exigencies of live performances. It’s a union nightmare and a producer’s dream.
“We started out with three people on the crew, but it became obvious that I could run the whole technical end of the show by myself,” says Martin. “What you can do if you apply the technology right is significantly raise the level of the production values.”
And that’s the real story here. As prerecorded entertainment products — CD and DVD, mostly — decline in sales, the entertainment industry is turning to live performances to replace those revenues. Just as we’ve seen in regional theatre and the church market, audience expectations from experiences with high-end productions migrate to every scale. What My Baby Grand proves is that higher production values don’t have to be sacri-ficed because of cost. Remember when Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney had that cinematic epiphany in Babes In Arms, where they exclaimed, “We can put on a show! We can make costumes and make a stage in the barn!” Add a laptop, and they could have had one hell of a show in that barn.
Contact Dan at ddaley@plsn.com
